3.15.2011

• In 2009, the Brazilian art collective Ocupeacidade created a life-sized VW bus from paper and then "brought the van into the streets of their city, moving it as it were a car from the Flintstones, just with their feet. They executed this performance in order to raise awareness regarding environmental topics and to make people critically consider traffic and car-based transport culture."

• Julian Schnabel's Miral (trailer) -- which screens this Friday night at the Walker Art Center, with an introduction by Schnabel himself -- screened at the United Nations in New York last night despite efforts by the American Jewish Committee to shut it down. Harvey Weinstein, the Jewish-American producer and distributor for the film, countered criticisms: “The simple answer is if you don’t tell the story from both sides, you will never understand…I know you’re not supposed to be political, but you can’t exist in this world if you aren’t.” Said Schnabel when the film -- about an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war -- debuted at Venice: "Coming from my background, as an American Jewish person whose mother was president of Hadassah [the Women's Zionist Organisation of America] in 1948, I figured I was a pretty good person to try to tell the story of the other side."

Paul Schmelzer is web editor at the Walker Art Center, creator of Signifier, signed, a former editor at Adbusters and contributor to Artforum.com, Cabinet, Raw Vision, The Progressive, Utne and others.More >>